I learnt something doing a talk
/I was the keynote speaker at a business conference. I was speaking at 12:30pm but I was at the conference all morning listening to the speakers who were on before me.
By about 9:30am, I had a bubbling sensation in the side of my head and it felt like a big bubble was lodged behind my ear. So I tried yawning several times to make my ears “pop” but nothing worked. Then the right ear started which got me worrying. I realised I couldn’t hear very well generally. Not only that but, although I was sitting down, I started to feel a bit wobbly and unbalanced, and I started to feel some panic that I wouldn’t be able to stand up straight, let alone speak for 40 minutes in front of 250 people in a few hours time.
I had my cell phone with me and twice I went to text a practitioner to ask for immediate help but both times I thought “no, God is here…right here and immediate.” Before Association I’d been reading thoroughly a couple of old Association Addresses, particularly the one that dealt with Soul and I’d gained a clearer sense that God is right here and is the only Mind and Soul that I have, instantly accessible.
So I consciously made myself quiet, mentally, even though the various speeches were still going on, and listened for what God was saying as I knew that God is always speaking to us, we just have to listen.
The first thought that came was, “And o’er earth’s troubled, angry sea I see Christ walk/ And come to me, and tenderly, Divinely talk.” (Hymn 253) This is something that has come up a lot in work with a practitioner over the last year and I have come to understand more clearly that physical problems are just the manifestation of thought and it’s only ever the thought that needs healing.
I realised that whatever this seemed to be it was just thought. It occurred to me that it had been a few months since I had done a speech at a conference, let alone a keynote speech, and also that I had not done this particular talk before. There was some anxiety about it that I hadn’t recognised. In the writing of it I had been grateful for information and inspiration that had come after acknowledging God as the author of it, but I had forgotten that it’s Mind, Soul, that gives the speech too! That calmed thought nicely.
Then the thought came “Fear never stopped being and it’s action” - a sentence from Science and Health on p. 151 that has pulled me up a few times. This told me that irrespective of how I felt physically, I would go on that stage and do the job and I would be held up in the doing of it. I had another 45 minutes before I was on, the ears still felt weird, and I couldn’t hear properly. But I knew I would be all right.
For the first few minutes of my speech I was aware of the deafness in one ear but after that I forgot it and just spoke. There was no dizziness or wobbling. One person in the audience tweeted that I was delivering the talk “with punch.”
About half an hour after the event as I was talking to some people, the sensations came back for a while and then on the train going home they came back quite strongly. I started to wonder if I was going to have to deal with deafness but pulled myself up and reminded myself again that it was just erroneous thought.
After I got home I was tired and laid down on the sofa. After about an hour, I suddenly realised that the deafness had gone completely. Nothing bubbling or being weird was left. And I realised properly then that it really was mental and just the manifestation of troubled, anxious thought. It hasn’t come back since, even slightly.
It’s been a helpful experience because it really felt like a solid something was wrong but, looking back, it clearly was mental. It has been a good reminder with other issues that seem very solid. If that one wasn’t, then none of the other stuff can be either.